Obama: AK-47s belong on battlefield, not streets

NEW ORLEANS – President Obama touched the sensitive issue of guns here on Wednesday, pivoting off last week’s Colorado movie theater shootings to call for a “consensus around violence reduction" in the country.

With the last public event of a four-day trip that started with a visit to the Aurora, Colo., hospital where almost two dozen victims were brought after the shootings, Obama said he supports measures to conduct background checks to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, fugitives and the mentally ill.

“These steps shouldn’t be controversial, they should be common sense,” he told the National Urban League conference.

Obama's remarks in the Big Easy about guns were the most extensive of his term, going farther than what he said after the 2011 shooting in Tucson, where six people were killed, and former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and a dozen others survived gunshot wounds. White House aides have acknowledged new gun laws are still politically impossible in the current election-year climate, but Obama's comments suggest he's at least willing to talk about the issue.

“I – like most Americans – believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual the right to bear arms,” Obama said. “I think we recognize the traditions of gun ownership passed on from generation to generation, that hunting and shooting are part of a cherished national heritage.

“But I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers and not in the hands of crooks. They belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities,” he added.

Obama bemoaned the lack of political will to tackle gun issues, noting how congressional leaders have so far shown little interest in advancing new legislation following the Colorado shooting.

“When there’s an extraordinarily heartbreaking tragedy like the one we saw, there’s always an outcry immediately after for action,” Obama said. “There’s talk of new reforms. There’s talk of legislation. And too often those efforts are defeated by politics and by lobbying and eventually by the pull of our collective attention elsewhere. But what I said in the wake of Tucson is we’re going to stay on this persistently.”

Obama said he'd "continue to work with members of both parties and with religious groups and with civic organizations to arrive at a consensus around violence reduction."

And Obama had a message to Americans that went beyond government.

“As we convene these conversations, let’s be clear even as we debate government’s role, we have to understand that when a child opens fire on another child, there’s a hole in that child’s heart that government alone can’t fill," he said. "It’s got to be up to us as parents, as neighbors and as teachers and as mentors to make sure our young people don’t have that void inside them. It’s up to us to spend time with them. To pay more attention to them. To show them more love and they learn to love each other and they learn to love one another and they grow up knowing what it is to walk a mile in somebody else’s shoes and to view the world in somebody else’s eyes."

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post misstated a quote from the president about background checks for gun purchases. Obama said, "[W]e should check someone’s criminal record before they can check out a gun seller."